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Once sailor, forever sailor

Friday, May 24, 2013

Obama Speaks to Naval Graduates About Sexual Assault Issue

The president said he would carry out a ship-building schedule that
would achieve a 300-ship fleet with capacities that exceed the power of
the next dozen nations’ navies combined.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

In his commencement speech at
the Naval Academy on Friday, the president praised the military as the
nation’s “most trusted institution,” but took note of the recent cases
in which service members have been charged with sexual assault.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — President Obama used a commencement speech before Naval
Academy graduates on Friday to urge them to follow an “inner compass”
and to warn that rising numbers of sexual assaults in the military
threatened to erode America’s faith in the armed forces.

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The president praised the military as the nation’s “most trusted
institution,” but took note of the recent cases in which service members
have been charged with sexual assault. He said those people “threaten
the trust and discipline which makes our military strong.”

“We need your honor, that inner compass that guides you,” the president
said, essentially using the platform at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial
Stadium to scold those who have strayed from that direction recently.
“Even more than physical courage, we need your moral courage — the
strength to do what’s right, even when it’s unpopular.”

Mr. Obama delivered his remarks under cloudy, drizzly skies to 1,047
graduates, most of whom will receive commissions as officers in the
Navy, the Marine Corps or the Air Force. Before the president spoke, Ray
Mabus, the secretary of the Navy, said jokingly that the graduates had
completed a journey “you began once you turned down your acceptance to
West Point.”

It was the second time Mr. Obama had addressed the graduates of the
academy, and he was welcomed with enthusiastic cheers as he
congratulated them on becoming the military’s latest officers. He echoed
his remarks from a day earlier, telling the graduates that they enter
the services at a time of transition in the war against terrorism.

“We still need to conduct precise, targeted strikes against terrorists
before they kill our citizens,” he said, noting the end of the Iraq war
and next year’s expected end of the American role in Afghanistan. But he
said, “we need to stay ready for the whole range of threats.”

Four years after the president’s first visit here, the specter of the
growing number of sexual assaults in the armed forces gave the speech
more of a somber tone. Mr. Obama said that incidents of sexual assault
threatened to undermine the military’s credibility just as failures of
integrity undermine trust in politicians, financial institutions and
government workers.

“As we’ve seen again in recent days,” the president said, apparently
referring to the actions of officials at the Internal Revenue Service in
targeting conservative groups. “It only takes the misconduct of a few
to erode the public’s trust in their institutions.”

He referred directly to the sexual assaults, telling the midshipmen that
“if we want to restore the trust the American people deserve to have in
their institutions, then we all have to do our part.”

The issue has become a major concern in the wake of several incidents,
some of them involving military officials who were supposed to be in
charge of preventing sexual assaults. A Pentagon study this month
estimated that as many as 26,000 members of the military were sexually
assaulted last year.

After summoning his top military officials to the White House this
month, Mr. Obama said they told him they were ashamed of the behavior of
some in the services.

“They care about this and they are angry about it,” Mr. Obama said. “I
heard directly from all of them that they are ashamed by some of what’s
happened.”

At the Naval Academy, Mr. Obama also affirmed his plans to redefine the
way America wages the fight against terrorism. In a speech at the
National Defense University on Thursday, the president said the country
needed to continue to attack terror cells while getting off the war
footing it has been on for more than a decade.

That message is most likely to be of intense interest to the graduates
as they prepare for a military careers. Mr. Obama has largely ended the
war in Iraq and is winding down American involvement in Afghanistan,
where troops are slated to come home by the end of next year.

Concerns about sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military are
not new. In 1991, dozens of women were assaulted by members of the Navy
and the Marines at a Las Vegas Hotel where the Tailhook Association was
having its annual convention. Tailhook is a nonprofit association that
supports naval aviators.

The resulting scandal raised the issue of sexual assaults in the
military to new heights. But critics said too few senior leaders in the
military were found culpable for a culture that allowed the assaults to
occur.

Aides said the president was not likely to offer major new policies in
the speech. But the president may use the opportunity to once again
ratchet up his outrage over the possibility that sexual assaults are not
taken seriously in the military. At a news conference early this month,
Mr. Obama expressed impatience with his commanders.

“I don’t want just more speeches or awareness programs or training but,
ultimately, folks look the other way,” Mr. Obama said in an East Room
event with Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea. “If we find out
somebody is engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be held accountable —
prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired,
dishonorably discharged. Period. It’s not acceptable.”